Description
Our long term goal has always been to create a website that allows families to save time shopping for personal care and household products by setting up a dynamic recurring order system. We need your help to rate and tell us what you think about the following idea; maybe let us know if you'd ever use the service, give us any interesting design ideas for our website, or offer us insight and tips about how to best create Care Pack 2.0.
Here's our idea:
The Predictablility Project
Problem
There are a variety of personal care, household cleaning, and pet care products that all Americans must spend hours of time purchasing each month to maintain their daily routines. Unfortunately, it is impossible to keep stock of the wide variety of products in these categories without unexpectedly running out of something, especially if you live an active lifestyle. The problem with running out of personal care products unexpectedly is that they are necessities, you can't go a day without many of them. If you run out of deodorant and pet food, you can't afford to wait a couple of days to go to the store or have your items delivered to you, you need them now lest you smell terrible and let your dog go hungry. This means that many Americans must constantly make unscheduled trips to the store to purchase a few relatively inexpensive necessities, wasting their already limited and precious time.
Solution
Care Pack will allow Americans to design a custom package of personal care and household cleaning items that can be regularly sent to their home. A customer may choose items from a variety of brands that they use on a very regular basis. After creating an online virtual package of these items, the customer may specify how frequently they want these items delivered to their house, from as frequently as every two weeks to as infrequently as every 6 months. Every time the customer’s specified amount of time passes, a box full of their items will arrive at their doorstep and they will be charged. The customer will have the option of skipping, changing, or even cancelling their order a few days before their package arrives. Their new order can then be delivered as soon as a few days after their initial change.
Market
We will start out by marketing to first time Mothers and slowly expand to serve all families with children. At Care Pack, marketing to families of young children is the way to go because raising a child is no easy task. Since raising a baby or child takes a ton of time and energy, we believe that homemakers will greatly appreciate Care Pack's ability to take the burden of shopping for personal care items off their shoulders. When we eventually end up marketing to Mothers of college students, we also hope to secure a small customer base of young adults who would continue to utilize the same Care Pack system their family enjoys using.
Competition
The Online Retail sector is one of the fastest growing and most innovative fields in the US and thus has attracted a variety of competitors. Unfortunately, the systems retailers use nowadays to sell Personal Care items to their customers are completely obsolete and inefficient. When you order an item from Amazon, it typically takes two to seven days to deliver, an unacceptable wait for something you must rely on every day. Retail stores are a tremendous hassle to go to every week alone and it is even more time consuming when you run out of a single product unexpectedly, forcing you to make an unscheduled trip to the store. Subscribe and Save is no better either: they not only offer a sloppy, disorganized selection system, but they'll wildly vary the price of any items you subscribe to, so you never know what you're truly paying. Grove Collaborative offers a similar reorder system to the one that I'm suggesting, but they have a limited market of primarily young adults who enjoy all-natural products.